Politics and History in Ben Okri’s the Famished Road

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 90 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elif Diler ◽  
Derya Emir

In the post-World War II period, magical realism, as a distinctive mode of fiction, has offered cultural hybridity, transformation and intermingling, and has thus been a significant means of communication for the postcolonial world. It has enabled postcolonial authors to get the chance of observing the world from a different perspective and seeing the truth with a ‘third eye’. The Nigerian-British author Ben Okri’s The Famished Road, which was awarded the Booker Prize in 1991, is one of the postcolonial magical realist novels aiming at viewing the world with a third eye. In The Famished Road, Okri attempts to investigate sociopolitical and historical realities, to understand and solve the paradoxes and secrets of history in the language of magic and dreams. In the novel he connects politics directly with the concept of history; his conception of ‘inviolate’ African consciousness becomes the base for his representation of history. The aim of this study is to scrutinize the ways in which Okri encodes African consciousness versus Western epistemology and reevaluates history. The study tries to analyze how Okri redreams postcolonial potentials for his hometown, Nigeria, by extension for the whole African continent, through magical realism functioning as a third eye in The Famished Road.

2019 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 37-41
Author(s):  
Maftuna Sanoqulova ◽  

This article consists of the politics which connected with oil in Saudi Arabia after the World war II , the relations of economical cooperations on this matter and the place of oil in the history of world economics


Author(s):  
John Lie

In the 2010s, the world is seemingly awash with waves of populism and anti-immigration movements. Yet virtually all discussions, owing to the prevailing Eurocentric perspective, bypass East Asia (more accurately, Northeast Asia) and the absence of strong populist or anti-immigration discourses or politics. This chapter presents a comparative and historical account of East Asian exceptionalism in the matter of migration crisis, especially given the West’s embrace of an insider-outsider dichotomy superseding the class- and nation-based divisions of the post–World War II era. The chapter also discusses some nascent articulations of Western-style populist discourses in Northeast Asia, and concludes with the potential for migration crisis in the region.


Author(s):  
Neilton Clarke

Gutai Art Association [Gutai Bijutsu Kyōkai] [具体美術協会] was an influential post-World War II Japanese avant-garde collective with an outward-looking mindset. Founded in 1954 in Ashiya, near Osaka, by Japanese artist Jirō Yoshihara (1905–1972), it had fifty-nine members over the course of its eighteen-year lifespan. Gutai—meaning ‘‘embodiment’’ and ‘‘concreteness’’—saw its artists engage a plethora of media and presentation contexts, often beyond gallery walls and frequently with more emphasis upon process than on finished product. A unifying factor among its multifarious tendencies was a spirit of adventure, exemplified by Yoshihara’s oft-cited call to ‘‘do what no one has done before.’’ Embracing performance, theatricality, and outdoor manifestations, with a characteristic impromptu modus operandi, Gutai’s experimental tendencies and liberal ideals breathed new life into art and into a society remaking itself following the cataclysm and repressions of World War II. As Japan entered the 1960s, consolidating its economy and engagement with the rest of the world, the decidedly offbeat stance of Gutai’s earlier years assumed a cooler demeanor, due in part to nation-wide technological advancement, growing internationalism, and an evolving audience base and receptivity. The Gutai group disbanded following Yoshihara’s passing in 1972.


1980 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 401-422 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steven Topik

The growth of public enterprise is generally viewed as a product of the post-World War II developmentalist state. In late-developing capitalist countries, however, many important firms already came under state control during preceding liberal regimes. Because of the liberal context in which they operated, such companies frequently adopted policies that differed in important ways from those followed under the developmentalist state. The purpose of this study is to focus on the Banco do Brasil—the single most important publicly controlled firm of Brazil's First Republic (1889-1930) and today the seventh largest bank in the world—in order to examine the nature of state enterprise in a liberal regime.


Author(s):  
Mogami Toshiki

This chapter examines international law in Japan. It begins by looking at Japan’s embroilment with international law in the course of its efforts to revise the unequal treaties which had been concluded with about a dozen Occidental states while Japan was categorized as one of the ‘barbarian’ states in the world. After gradually overcoming this unequal status, it became a late-coming big power around the end of World War I. This big power then plunged into World War II, with the result that it was then branded an aggressor state and was penalized in an international tribunal. After that defeat, it turned into both a serious complier of new—that is, post-World War II—international law and a state deeply obedient to the United States. These factors have brought about complex international law behaviour as well as serious constraints in Japan’s choice of international law action.


Author(s):  
Kathleen Sprows Cummings

This chapter focuses on Elizabeth Ann Seton’s cause between papal conclave of 1939, when her cause leaped forward at the Roman Center, through Seton’s beatification in 1963. It analyzes gender and power in the Catholic church through the conflict between Seton’s Daughters of Charity and the Vincentian priest assigned to serve as Seton’s vice-postulator. It explains the fierce competition between Seton’s advocates and those of John Neumann, who was also beatified in 1963. The chapter argues that in the post-World War II era, saints became stand-ins for U.S. Catholics' new role in the nation and in the world--and harbingers of more transformations on the way, in sanctity and beyond.


1994 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 107-115
Author(s):  
Ludmila Fialová

During the period between the World Wars differences in the age at first marriage and proportions married in the Czech and Slovak areas of the Czechoslovak Republic showed the two to be distinct regions. In the post-World War II period, however, differences in both measures have diminished and have almost disappeared, suggesting homogenization of demographic behavior. Current ages at first marriage have fallen to the levels-interwar demographers believed to be conducive to family instability.


Arts ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 60
Author(s):  
Susan Nashman Fraiman

This paper discusses the design and symbolism of a hitherto unpublished work by the artist Arthur Szyk (1894–1951), an ark for the Torah which he designed for the Forest Hills Jewish Center of Queens, New York, and which was dedicated in 1949. The Torah Ark is the central focus of all synagogue worship. Szyk’s ark is unique in its multiplicity of symbols and texts, which was at odds with the modernist idiom of post-World War II synagogue architecture. This research, which also brings previously unpublished material, analyzes the possible sources for the work and its distinctive message, which is exceptional in the world of modern contemporary Jewish art.


Author(s):  
Dr. Muhammad Tariq ◽  
Amjad Ali Khan ◽  
Ejaz Khan

The US has played a significant role in the world particularly during the post-world War–II period. The changing role has been ascribed by some to the Trump administration while by others it has been attributed to the Obama administration. Democratic Peace Theory provides the basic theoretical framework for the study while four key factors of the US role have been elucidated. The focus of this paper is to investigate the role played by the US in the post-World War-II era to date coupled with the changing behavior of the US from time to time during different regimes. The main objectives of the paper include global leadership, defense, and promotion of liberal international order, freedom, democracy, and prevention of the emergence of hegemonic power. It is an important fact that the US has played the role of world hegemony, particularly in the post-World War-II era.


Text Matters ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 258-277
Author(s):  
Klara Szmańko

Walter Mosley’s Devil in a Blue Dress contributes significantly to the literary debate on the definition of whiteness. The socio-historical construction of whiteness emerging from the novel is amplified by white imagery dovetailing with the claims made about white people directly. For the African American first person narrator, Easy Rawlins, living in post-World War II Los Angeles, whiteness mostly spells terror. The oppressive faces of whiteness consist in the following trajectories: property relations, economic exploitation, labour relations, the legal system, different miens of oppressive white masculinity denigrating blackness, spatial dynamics of post-World War II Los Angeles and the white apparatus of power that the narrator needs to confront throughout the novel. White imagery carried to the extreme magnifies the terrorizing aspect of whiteness in the narrative. Like many authors of colour, Mosley associates whiteness with death. Whiteness inundates Easy Rawlins from all sides, entailing insincerity, dishonesty, interestedness and hypocrisy.


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